"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody
you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that
only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant
total amazement." That's a quote from the film JOE VERSUS THE
VOLCANO. I cannot claim to be one of the people who are awake by
that definition, but I will say that I live in a state of frequent
amazement. By that standard I cannot claim to be awake, but I am
at least in a fitful sleep that I wake up from frequently. I can
say I am often amazed, and if you are living life without being
frequently amazed yourself you are doing it wrong. Particularly
when so many things around you that are amazing you never even
think about. My latest source of amazement is slime molds. Who
gives much thought to slime molds?

Let's face it; the name is a little off-putting itself. Food goes
bad when it gets moldy. Somehow there is a something a little
disgusting about food that has started growing fungus. And if that
is not bad enough to become slimy in the process is going just a
few steps too far. But slime molds, I have recently learned, are
really fascinating. Below I cite a really interesting New York
Times article about slime molds that was a real eye-opener.

First they are not really molds. They are apparently amoebae that
live off of rotting dead wood. As long as there is rotting wood
around they are happy and perhaps not all that interesting, though
I wouldn't bet on that. What is interesting is what they do when
there is not enough food round. Do they just wither and die alone?
No. They may be only amoebae, but they know how to cooperate.
They form first into a mob of amoebae, a blob made up of thousands.
And then the blob comes to life. It becomes a single multi-
cellular creature of its own, a lot like a slug. It is a gestalt
creature made up of thousands of individual cooperating cells. And
this single body will feed on what wood it can find and the food
gets distributed to all the cells. It becomes a society working
for all its individual members. In reproduction they even divide in
unison. Millions of cells and all the cells divide in the same
instant, that is how synchronized they become. They are not
following a leader. They just spontaneously coordinate with each
other and behave even more synchronized than most multi-cell
creatures.

Can you think of other examples of gestalts of cells cooperating
like a multi-cell animal? You should be able to. You are one. Of
course, the cells of your body are never all split up and go their
separate ways. In a slime mold they just come together and form
into a single body.

So what does the ad hoc creature do besides feed its members? It
crawls to the surface of the ground. It then transforms itself
into shoots and other slime molds climb to the top and act sticky.
When an animal comes by they stick to its foot and are carried to
another part of the forest where there might be some new yummy
rotting wood. This is all just individual amoebae collaborating
and cooperating.

Not amazed yet? How's this? If they find multiple pieces of food
near each other they will swarm into something like a puddle over
all. But where there is no food under that puddle the amoebae will
mostly dissipate into smaller swarms. But to distribute the
nutrients they leave lines connecting the small swarms. The small
swarms are tentacles that are like highways. But not just randomly
placed tentacles. They seem to be a very nearly mathematically
perfect minimal highway system to cover the territory connecting
the blobs. As the article cited below says "In 2010 [Andrew
Adamatzky, a researcher at the University of West England] and his
colleagues placed a slime mold in the middle of a map of Spain and
Portugal, with pieces of food on the largest cities. The slime mold
grew a network of tentacles that was nearly identical to the actual
highway system on the Iberian Peninsula."

These are just amoebae. How much intelligence can go into a single
cell? But when they cooperate as microscopic parallel processors
they can design nearly perfect minimal highway systems! Humans
need computers to match that feat. Adamatzky suggests that
countries planning roadway systems leave the laying out of the road
to slime molds. They will be nearly perfect, and what other
engineer will do complex mathematical work for a few bits of oat
flake?

So these really bizarre behaviors are going on in a wooded area
near you. Who knew?

Choose a truly obscure, gibberish password (e.g.,
"V*!amYEg5M5!3R") and store it somewhere. There are on-line
password managers that can help you with this.

The first two are theoretically the easiest, but there are a couple
of problems:

The recommendation is also to use a different password for every
site. I have accounts on at least a hundred sites. I would have
to think of a hundred sentences or (non-)word sequences, remember
them all, and know which went with which site. I suppose you could
do something like "I love to ski and this is my password for X."
and then fill in X with the site name (e.g., "I love to ski and
this is my password for amazon.") Of course, if someone guesses or
finds one password, they have them all.

Most sites won't let you do either of these. Site A says a
password has to be between 6 and 12 characters, too short for these
approaches. Mark suggests that you can still use a sentence--just
take the first letter of each word. But Site B insists on at least
one upper-case letter, so if you've chosen lower case words for the
first or second option, you're out of luck. Site C requires at
least one number; site D insists on at least one capital letter,
one number, and one special character from a pre-defined set. Site
E takes whatever you enter and decides based on some secret rule
whether *it* thinks the password is strong enough.

And the problem with the third choice, the gibberish password, is
that unless you are a professional typesetter, typing it correctly
is really difficult, even when you are looking at it and can see
what you are typing. The one above took me twenty-five seconds and
I made one typo, which would be invisible if I were typing it into
a password box. One could easily find oneself locked out after
three typos using this sort of password. [-ecl]

I was very interested to hear recently Nigel Burton's account of
his ill-fated interview with Christopher Lee. Years ago I had
heard that the role Lee really wanted to play was Mohammed Ali
Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. I wondered how that would work,
since I really do not think of Lee as looking Pakistani. Until
Burton's email I was unaware that the film had actually been made.
Certainly it must have crept by under my radar, and I had never
heard of the film.

Wonder of wonders, it is yet another feature film that is available
directly from YouTube. The film is fairly good and makes a good
companion film to GANDHI. Gandhi is certainly part of Jinnah's
story and vice versa. I have heard that after a long career this
is the film that Christopher Lee is most proud of. People
interested can see the film in English at

I feel for Nigel, but one has to remember that filmmakers and
actors who become major contributors to the genre are not
necessarily big fans. I think Christopher Lee at least likes
horror. I believe I heard Boris Karloff was actually very
indifferent to horror films. Similarly I know Burgess Meredith who
was a very fine actor was very disappointed to find that many of
his fans could only name one role he had played, the Penquin in
TV's "Batman".

I think that Lee would rather be associated with helping people to
understand who Jinnah was and why he was important to history than
to be remembered for biting women on the neck. Lee undoubtedly
feels he had much more to offer than his Hammer films allowed him.

Ironically there is an element of fantasy to JINNAH that is quite
enjoyable, but I will not spoil it. [-mrl]

BLAKE'S 7 is one of the more famous British science fiction
television programs. The show was produced by the BBC in 1978 and
written by Terry Nation who was known for creating the Daleks for
DOCTOR WHO as well as the 1975 series SURVIVORS. BLAKE'S 7 ran for
a total of four series (seasons). The show is a space-based
adventure series that focuses on a group of escaped criminals from
the totalitarian Federation. The first series stars Gareth Thomas
as Roj Blake and Sally Knyvette as Jenna Stannis.

When it comes to British genre television, there are five or six
series that are considered the "big" series that every fan should
watch. I'm already intimately familiar with DOCTOR WHO, THE
PRISONER and the various "Quatermass" serials, but BLAKE'S 7's lack
of a major United States release has kept me from viewing the
series until I was able to work around that. Being a fan of
dystopian fiction I was very much looking forward to checking this
show out.

The show is a space-based series that takes place in a stellar
empire run by a totalitarian government known as the Federation.
The story opens at a "hospital" where Roj Blake, a famous
revolutionary, has been reprogrammed for release by the Federation.
Shortly after his release he is witness to a secret anti-government
protest that is mercilessly (i.e. no survivors) put down by
Federation troops. Unfortunately, some of the soldiers involved
see Blake as he attempts to sneak away. Blake is rounded up again
and this time charged with a number of false crimes to guarantee
his internment on a prison planet.

It is during the process of transport, via prison ship, to the
penal colony that Blake's lot changes. The prison ship encounters
a conflict between two sets of alien warships. One of the ships
survives but has been abandoned and is drifting un-crewed in space.
The crew of the prison ship realize that the alien vessel could
have technology new to the Federation and, if they were to
successfully salvage it, could improve their position in life
(corruption seems rampant within the Federation, which is not
terribly surprising given their form of government). After the
first crew members die attempting to board the warship, the
officers decides to use the prisoners instead. Blake, Jenna and
another prisoner named Kerr Avon successfully board the ship which
has an on-board AI named Zen. They manage to avoid Zen's defense
systems and reason with it to take the ship for themselves which
they ultimately name the Liberator.

The series goes forward with each episode being an individual
adventure with a few on going story lines as well. BLAKE'S 7 was
supposedly inspired a good deal by "Star Trek", and this is obvious
from the story telling in that there is a definite sort of "reset
button" vibe to the show which is strangely at odds with the
continuing story lines. For those unfamiliar with the reset button
concept, this means that each episode is a self-contained story
with all of the characters and their environment returned to normal
(i.e. how things were at the beginning of the episode) by the end.

I found the characters in the first series to be somewhat varied in
quality. Blake, Villa and especially Avon are very distinct
characters whereas Gan and Vila are borderline stereotypes. One
aspect of the characters that was refreshing for me is that they
are really not heroes. They are revolutionaries and criminals and
especially in the cases of Avon and Vila, dangerous ones that would
probably be imprisoned in any sort of society.

The entire first series was authored by the series creator Terry
Nation and, I found the writing to be surprisingly even. While
this is good in that there were no truly poor episodes, except for
maybe one, there were also no episodes that I can point to as
outstanding either. The one episode I wasn't happy with was titled
"Duel" and was a swipe of the short story "Arena" by Frederic
Brown. I hope that Mr. Brown made generous royalty money off of
this story as this is the third time I've seen it used in a genre
TV series, the other two times being "Fun and Games" in THE OUTER
LIMITS and, of course, the "Star Trek" episode of the same name.
The series felt very much like it was trying to be one thirteen-
part story, but I am guessing the reset button effect was used in
an attempt to make the show more episodic like "Star Trek", perhaps
in an attempt to further differentiate it from DOCTOR WHO. I
really feel that the writing should have fully taken one approach
or the other as the two never felt like they mixed that well.

The one other big problem with the series was the quality of the
visual effects. I am a long time "Doctor Who" fan, so dodgy visual
effects are not something that generally bother me in a genre
television series. Having said that, I found the visual effects
work in series one of BLAKE'S 7 to be somewhat distracting. This
was airing at the same time as the "Key to Time" story arc season
of DOCTOR WHO so I have a pretty good direct comparison between the
two and it's very clear that the visual effects on BLAKE'S 7 are a
notch below the DOCTOR WHO episodes. The effects used for the
Liberator's matter transporter I found particularly irritating, but
that might just be me.

Even with these complaints, I still found the series worth
watching. The whole set-up does require a bit of a leap of faith
on the part of the viewer, but it more or less worked for me. The
show is certainly a unique entry in space based genre television.
The ideas are really good and I think that a "Battlestar
Galactica"-style reinvention of the show would be an extremely
worthwhile project. I'm not sure if I will ever revisit BLAKE'S 7,
but I am certainly planning on watch the remaining three series of
the show's run. [-ns]

So, continuing the theme of being unable to get through my to-read
stack in anything resembling a reasonable period of time, I finally
was able to get to ABSOLUTION GAP, over three years after I read
the previous book in the series, REDEMPTION ARK. So, all in all,
it took me some eight years to get through the first four books in
the REVELATION SPACE series by Alastair Reynolds. I know, some
people don't count CHASM CITY in this series, but for ease of
making a point I do.

I liked this book. I really liked this book. It wasn't what I was
expecting, however. The previous books set up the Inhibitors to be
the focal point of the series, and yet, here, not so much.

Things aren't so good for humanity at this point. The Inhibitors
are rampaging against humanity. Our friend Nevil Clavain and his
gang have gone into hiding on the planet of Ararat. Clavain is
trying to get away from it all. He's had enough. Unfortunately
for him, a ship has landed on Ararat--where Clavain and the gang
are--and it seems to hold the key to the future of humanity.

Meanwhile, on the ship Gnostic Ascension, insane Ultra Queen
Jasmina is in a foul mood. She has hired on a fellow named Quaiche
to help her increase her fortune. Quaiche is supposed to find
treasures in various star systems that Jasmina can sell. He's
doing a lousy job. She's unhappy. She sends him off on one last
mission to give him a chance to redeem himself, but there's a
catch. She sends along his Ultra lover, Morwenna, in a torture
device called a scrimshaw suit. If he fails, she dies. If he
succeeds, well, he might live. While investigating a previously
uncharted--well, at least unnamed--star system, he finds something
that he thinks is worth investigating. However, he fails. He
fails spectacularly. And thus our story is set up.

The story takes place in a couple of different timelines that of
course eventually merge together. One of those timelines follows
Clavain and humanity on Ararat. They discover that the ship
contains Ana Khouri. who understands that her daughter is on
another downed ship on Ararat, in the hands of Skade. The
daughter, Aura, is apparently the key to saving humanity from the
Inhibitors.

The other timeline follows a teenaged girl named Rashmika, who
lives on the moon where Quaiche went down. She has an obsession
with the Scuttlers, a race that seems to have been eliminated by
the Inhibitors. It's a hard life there, and many try to find
employment with the Cathedrals and churches along the Permanent
Way. The Way was set up by Quaiche and his followers to observe
the planet Haldora, which occasionally disappears. Rashmika's
brother Harbin went to work for one of the Cathedrals, but hasn't
been heard from in years. Rashmika runs away from home to go look
for him, and to find out what really happened to the Scuttlers. As
you might imagine, Rashmika gets more than she bargained for when
she finally comes to the attention of the Cathedral Lady Morwenna,
run by Quaiche himself.

Reynolds tells a really terrific story here. The novel is well
written and reasonably well paced. I did have a couple of problems
with it, though. One is reasonably minor--it's just very long.
But that's not uncommon with a lot of writers these days.

The other problem was the letdown I experienced with where the
whole thing ended up, and by whole thing I mean the series. I
really don't want to go into more detail than that, as that would
be giving stuff away that would spoil the story. Even then, it
wasn't *that* much of a letdown, but it certainly didn't give me
the answers I was looking for.

Even then, I would recommend this book. Then again, I like this
kind of stuff. Why wouldn't I? [-jak]

CAPSULE: ETHOS: A TIME FOR CHANGE is a fast-paced 69 minutes filled
with charges of conspiracies of the rich and powerful in
corporations and government in their plan to take freedom from the
masses and plunge the world into a chaos of high prices and global
warming. Woody Harrelson is host and the voice of writer and
director Pete McGrain. There may be a lot of foolishness in the
particulars presented, but McGrain may well be right about where
the modern world is leading. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10

"The object of this documentary is to look at the flaws in our
systems that allow [bad] things to happen and the mechanisms that
actually work against us and to show you a very simple but powerful
way that we can actually change the world we live in." So says
writer and director Pete McGrain as spoken by Hollywood's great
voice of reason ... Woody Harrelson? ETHOS is a staccato
discharge of conspiracy charges against the common person putting
more wealth and power into the hands of a small number of very
wealthy and extremely powerful world manipulators. It only vaguely
tells us who these people are, but they seem to be the upper
echelons of a corporate-government alliance. Among the claims is
that the Rockefellers knew ahead of time that the September 11
attacks were coming and would be used to consolidate the power of
the government to control the people and steal their rights. All
these individual conspiracies, each damnable in itself, are just
part of a bigger and more global conspiracy to control a population
which will have given up all its rights for promised security from
invented threats.

The thing is, I like my conspiracies with a little more evidence
than McGrain gives himself time to present. He delivers a huge
list of charges and backs them up with testimony of famous authors
and quotes from famous people. He has Henry Ford railing against
the power of financiers. Funny, I had always thought that as an
expert on international affairs Ford knew a little about how to
make a factory work and not much beyond that. His views of the
international scene were strongly colored by his hatred and
distrust of the members of one particular religion.

One piece of the documentary is devoted to politicians who flip-
flop on their position or claims. We have Bill Clinton first
denying that he had sexual relations with Lewinsky and then later
admitting it. John McCain first saying that he thought gay
marriage should be allowed and later saying that he did not think
gay marriage should be legal. I am now convinced that politicians
may contradict themselves and sometimes their opinions on issues
actually change over time. So what? But I do not think that
McGrain really minds having the viewer unconvinced of his points.
He presents a shower of conspiracy theories from the Federal
Reserve's power to manipulate the economy anonymously to Monsanto's
part in poisoning our food. Some of his charges may be based on
fact or even be true. But it is hard to tell which ones.

This film is a Chamber of Possible Horrors. A staccato listing of
many possible conspiracies of varying degrees of credibility
challenges us with the statement that there are real conspiracies.
The suggestions have got to come fast because it is all packed into
a short 69-minute film, and there are a lot of conspiracies and
scary situations to get through. And no doubt some of what McGrain
is suggesting is indeed true, and no doubt some of it is absolute
balderdash. McGrain gives little evidence beyond quotes and
questionable testimony. Before the viewer has time to think about
one claim, McGrain has presented two more. What he presents lies
somewhere in the twilight zone between the Washington Post and the
Weekly World News.

And what is this solution for changing the world? That is
something of an anti-climax, though one most thoughtful people
would endorse. Even I do. It is to spend your money wisely. I
think he means spend it for the good of yourself, your children,
and the world. The consumer is all-powerful, because it is money
that makes the system work. The way we choose to spend our money
can change the world. That may well be true and I would endorse
his conclusion more than his arguments for that conclusion. It
would be an irony if he turns out overly optimistic about the
viability of that as a weapon to be marshaled. There may just be
too many of us who are too apathetic to be convinced.

Even if McGrain were wrong on most of his charges, he is probably
right on a few, and that is a sobering thought. The question is
which ones. I give this film a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or
6/10. ETHOS: A TIME FOR CHANGE will be released on DVD on February
7, 2012.

I'm a big "Dexter" fan, and finding new serial killers for him to
hunt down (and it's a broad definition that stretches from the
classic compulsive killer to some sociopath who has killed more
than once) is even more difficult than you might imagine. The
first season of the show more or less tracks the first book in the
series, but then the two go into alternate universes. Currently
his wife is dead on the show, but alive in the books, as is a
police detective who seems to be on to him, and his equally
homicidal brother. He has a child who's a girl in the books and a
boy on the show. His step-sister has become head of the homicide
squad on the show, but not in the books.

To go back and forth between the two is fascinating. [-dk]

Phil De Parto writes:

[Mark asks, "But wouldn't be great to do a series about an Elvis
impersonator who hunts down and kills other Elvis impersonators?"]

Actually, this was done as an episode of the late, lamented cop
show 80's spoof, SLEDGE HAMMER. Sledge had to go undercover in the
Famous Elvis Impersonators School. The killer turned out to be a
Japanese man who was killing the competition because: "I can
impersonate Elvis more efficiently!" [-pdp]

Theodore Roosevelt in THE WINNING OF THE WEST (1888) describes the
frontiersmen of 18th-century Kentucky and Tennessee in terms very
similar to those used by Alister Sparks to describe Afrikaners in
THE MIND OF SOUTH AFRICA. Which invites the question, are
"boundless individualism" and "a disputatious and schismatic
people" the cause or the effect of living on the edge of
civilisation? [-fl]

You, like me, defend the practice of skillfully dubbing a film as
being better than subtitling. Two films that I have used and
examples of where you get much more from a dubbed film are the
films Z and DAS BOOT. (It is interesting that we both picked the
example of DAS BOOT.) These are films I saw first in subtitled
form and then in dubbed. Each has people in the background of a
scene making comments. In the subtitled film you lose the
background comments. I suspect that foreign language speakers
would miss a lot if they saw subtitled rather than dubbed versions
of THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD or CITIZEN KANE.

The claim is made that the sound of an actor's voice is an
important part of a film, so you want to hear the original actor's
voice. However, I think the visuals are even more basic and
subtitles tell the viewer, "This is where you must look no matter
what is happening on the screen." [-mrl]

Last week I talked about some of the books that I read in
preparation for our South (actually, southern) Africa trip. This
week I will continue that discussion.

Another personal memoir was CROSSING THE LINE: A YEAR IN THE LAND
OF APARTHEID by William Finnegan (ISBN 978-0-520-08872-6).
Finnegan was an American who had been backpacking around the world
and ended up spending the year of 1980 in South Africa teaching in
a "coloured" high school in Cape Town. As such, he saw the two
school boycotts of that year from a unique perspective, and his
outsider (American) status gave him some opportunities for
interaction that white South Africans would not have had. For
Americans, Finnegan may be more accessible than Rian Malan (MY
TRAITOR'S HEART, discussed last week), because Finnegan is writing
from an American perspective.

However, what is striking is that both Malan (writing in 1990) and
Finnegan (writing in 1986) saw little hope for a peaceful
transition to a democratic government (with "one-person-one-vote")
in South Africa; both basically predicted civil war. But while
there was certainly violence throughout the 1980s and into the
1990s, the election of 1994 was held in relative peace, and the
results--a sweeping victory for the African National Party--were
eventually accepted by all. No one denies it has been a bumpy
road, both before and after the transition, but one need only look
at other African countries' attempts to transition power to see
what a miracle South Africa has been.

THE WASHING OF THE SPEARS by Donald Morris (ISBN 0-671-20233-2) was
not recommended, but since it was in the house, I figured I might
as well read it. Morris is highly regarded, but seems in many ways
to reflect the beliefs and prejudices of the time in which it
was written (it was published in 1965). For example, he states
that the Zulu (or Bantu, as he calls them) "probably entered Africa
with their cattle from the Fertile Crescent something over 10,000
years ago." Now, of course, it is recognized that the ancestors of
the Zulu were in Africa all along.

He also seems fairly dismissive of the "Bushmen" (also called the
"San") and the "Hottentots". These days, of course, the terms
"Bushmen" and "San" are each considered derogatory by some groups
of people, and "Hottentots" are now called the Khoikhoi. Morris
does recognize that the previously-used term "Kaffir" had become a
derogatory one, which is why he replaces it with "Bantu", but the
use of the term "Bantu" by the apartheid government in South Africa
makes its current use problematic.
Morris says that Shaka Zulu "was unquestionably a latent
homosexual, and despite the fact that his genitals had more than
made up for their previous dilatoriness, so that he always took
great pride in bathing in full public view, he was probably
impotent." Morris was only with great difficulty able to determine
what battles Shaka fought in and what military innovations he
introduced; the notion that he could determine that someone who
lived and died two hundred years ago in a preliterate society was a
*latent* homosexual can these days only be described as hubristic.

However, when Morris moves into the details of the Anglo-Zulu War
it becomes much more fact-based. I can understand why this is the
definitive work, and my only complaint is that there is *so* much
detail that it is impossible for the "casual" reader to keep track
of it all. A glossary of Bantu terms would definitely have helped,
as Morris uses a lot of Zulu terms which he defines once and then
assumes the reader will remember. There are also an incredible
number of people to try to keep straight, and my unfamiliarity with
the geography did not help. (I mean, if I am reading about
Revolutionary War battles in New Jersey, and the author talks about
the terrain near Princeton, or marching from Freehold to
Hightstown, I can picture it. But I cannot do the same for South
Africa, even with maps.)

I also read SHAKA KING OF THE ZULUS by Daniel Cohen (ISBN 978-0-
385-02509-6), again because it was in the house. This seems to be
aimed at "young adults" (i.e., teenagers), although the amount of
discussion about sex seems uncharacteristic of books promoted to
teenagers when I was one. Cohen covers the main points without
inundating the reader with details, and provides a glossary as
well, so was much easier to follow than the chapters of Morris
covering the same period. (Morris covers the entire period from
the rise of Dingiswayo to the end of the Anglo-Zulu War.) Cohen
also provides some guidance in his "Suggestions for Further
Reading", with notes such as "The author tends to the view that
Shaka was simply a monster" or "This is a unique treatment of Shaka
as a political figure rather than as an anthropological curiosity."

Next week I'll wrap up with some comments on more books (including
some southern African fiction) and movies. [-ecl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way
as to be understood by everyone, something that no
one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the
exact opposite.
--Paul Dirac